Comments on copyright

Abstract

In an article on the President's Page of February 1978 EOS (page 67), R. M. Ragan and J. C. Holoviak discuss some of the problems in the field of scientific publishing arising from the new copyright law. However, it seems to me that they fail to identify the principal interests of authors of scientific papers, namely, having their ideas recognized and quoted by others. The suggestion that an author's livelihood is protected by copyright may be appropriate to those who publish books, but it certainly is not appropriate to scientific publication in general. Ragan and Holoviak sense this when they recognize that authors of scientific papers may place their work in the public domain to remove ‘roadblocks to the rapid and widespread transfer of scientific knowledge.’ Actually, it is the publisher, not the author of scientific papers, that needs copyright protection, and Ragan and Holoviak quite appropriately argue that it is in the author's interest to see that scientific publishing remains a viable enterprise.